2 Primaries

See: U.S. presidential primaries, 2000

3 Overview and timeline (Election Day and beyond)

The 2000 Presidential election was among the closest elections in the history of the United States. Other close elections include the elections of 1800 (with a tie in electoral votes), 1876, 1916, 1960, 1968, and 1976.

The results of the November 7 election were not known for more than a month after the election, because the counting and recounting of Florida presidential ballots, which swung the election, extended for more than a month. Figures tallied up during election night gave 246 electoral votes to Bush and 255 to Gore, with New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), and Florida (25) too close to call at the time. Since 270 electoral votes are required to win, Florida would put either candidate over the top, and the other two states were irrelevant. (Both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of Gore over the next few days, making it 246-267.) Florida state law provided for an automatic recount due to the small margins. There were general concerns about the fairness and accuracy of the voting process, especially since a small change in the vote count could change the result. The final (and disputed) official Florida count gave the victory to Bush by 537 votes, making it the tightest race of the campaign (at least in percentage terms; New Mexico was decided by 363 votes but has a much smaller population, meaning those 363 votes represent a 0.061% difference while the 537 votes in Florida are just 0.009%).

The Democratic Party lodged a dispute over the state's election results requesting that disputed ballots in three heavily-Democratic counties be counted by hand. During the recounting process, the Bush campaign hired George H. W. Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker to oversee the legal process, and the Gore campaign hired Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Numerous local court rulings went both ways, some ordering recounts because the vote was so close and others declaring that a selective manual recount in a few heavily-Democratic counties would be unfair. Eventually, the Gore campaign appealed to the Florida Supreme Court in which it was ordered that the recounting process proceed. The Bush campaign subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) which took up the case Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board on December 1. On December 4, the SCOTUS returned this matter to the Florida Supreme Court for clarification due to their "considerable uncertainty" as to the reasons for certain aspects of the decision. The Florida Supreme Court clarified their ruling on this matter while the US Supreme Court was deliberating Bush v. Gore, and the two cases were then combined, with SCOTUS approving by 6-3 the Florida court's actions in the original case based on the clarifications provided.

Early in the afternoon of December 12, the Republican-dominated Florida House of Representatives voted nearly on party lines to certify the state's electors for Bush. Later that afternoon, the Florida Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings authorizing recounts in several south Florida counties.

All the lower court rulings became moot when around 10pm on December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in favor of Bush by a 5-4 vote, effectively ending the election. Seven of the nine justices cited differing vote-counting standards from county to county and the lack of a single judicial officer to oversee the recount, both of which, they ruled, violated the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution. The crucial 5 to 4 decision held that insufficient time remained to implement a unified standard and therefore all recounts must stop.

At 9pm on December 13, in a nationally televised address, Gore conceded that he lost his bid for the presidency. He asks his supporters to support Bush, saying, "This is America, and we put country before party." During his speech, Gore's family and Joe and Hadassah Lieberman stood quietly nearby.

Texas Governor George W. Bush became President-elect and began forming his transition committee. Bush tried to reach across party lines and bridge a divided America, stating that "the president of the United States is the president of every single American, of every race and every background."

On January 6, 2001, a joint session of Congress met to certify the U.S. Electoral College vote. Although several members of the House of Representatives filed objections to the electoral votes of Florida, they were ruled out of order, by Gore, because they were not signed by a Senator.

Bush took the oath of office on January 20.

Vice President Al Gore came in second even though he received a larger number of popular votes (Gore won 500,000 more popular votes than Bush) and this contributed to the controversy of the election. This was at least the fourth time that a candidate who did not receive a plurality of the popular vote received a majority of the Electoral College vote, the first time probably being in the 1824 elections although popular vote records do not exist for earlier elections. Until this election, the 1876 elections had been the most contentious in U.S. history. However, it should be pointed out that if the American system were based on the popular vote, rather than the Electoral College, then the turnout of voters would have been different. Voter turnout in states that favor one party heavily tends to be lower. Because of this, the popular vote cannot be used to predict who would have won an actual popular vote election.

Gore failed to win the popular vote in his home state of Tennessee. Had he won, it would have avoided the Florida controversy. Gore was the first major party presidential candidate to have lost his home state since George McGovern lost South Dakota in 1972.

4 Florida election results

On election night, it quickly became clear that Florida would be a contentious state. The national television networks, through information provided them by the Voter News Service, first called Florida for Gore well in advance of the polls closing in the most heavily Republican counties, then for Bush hours after all the polls had closed (leading to questions about the influence of biased national news media in the election process), then as 'too close to call'. The Voter News Service was an organization backed and supported by television networks and the Associated Press to help determine the results of presidential elections as early as possible, through early result tallies and exit polling.

Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida law mandated a statewide recount. In addition, the Gore campaign requested that the votes in three counties be recounted by hand. Florida state law (F.S. Ch. 102.166) at the time allowed the candidate to request a manual recount by protesting the results of at least three precincts. The county canvassing board then decides whether or not to recount (F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 4) as well as the method of the recount in those three precincts. If the board discovers an error, they are then authorized to recount the ballots (F.S. Ch. 102.166 Part 5). The canvassing board did not discover any errors in the tabulation process in the initial mandated recount. The Bush campaign sued to prevent additional recounts on the basis that no errors were found in the tabulation method until subjective measures were applied in manual recounts. This case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 to stop the vote count, which allowed Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to certify the election results. This allowed Florida's electoral votes to be cast for Bush, making him the winner. Seven of the nine Justices agreed that the lack of unified standards in counting votes violated the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection, but five agreed that there was insufficient time to impose a unified standard and that the recounts should therefore be stopped.

Final certified vote for the state of Florida (25 electoral votes)

Presidential Candidate	Vote Total	Pct	Party
George W. Bush (W)	2,912,790	48.850	Republican
Al Gore	2,912,253	48.841	Democrat
Ralph Nader	97,421	1.633	Green
Patrick J. Buchanan	17,412	0.292	Reform
Harry Browne	16,102	0.270	Libertarian
John Hagelin	2,274	0.038	Natural Law/ Reform
Howard Phillips	1,378	0.023	Constitution
Other	3,027	0.051	-
Total	5,962,657	100.00
Source: CBS News State Results for Election 2000

4.1 Controversy in Florida

Following the election a number of studies have been made of the electoral process in Florida by Democrats, Republicans and other interested parties. A number of flaws and improprieties have been discovered in the process. Controversies included:

• The television news media called the state for Al Gore around 8:48pm EST, while voters in the western panhandle (which is in the Central Time Zone) of the state were still voting, potentially depressing the voter turnout. The media also announced polls were closed in Florida while polls in CST were open. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who did not vote due to confusion as high as 15,000. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. The McLaughlin survey estimates the media announcements of closed polls and a Gore victory cost Bush a margin of 5,000 votes.

• Jeb Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, was governor of Florida, leading some Gore advocates to make various allegations of impropriety, especially due to their joint campaigning for the Republican vote in Florida and Jeb Bush's assurances to George W. Bush that the Republicans could win Florida. However, it is typical for sitting governors to strongly campaign on behalf of the candidate with the same party affiliation.

• The actions of the Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who was in charge of state election procedures, also came under fire, due to her status as a Bush state campaign chairwoman, her involvement with the " scrub list", and her behavior during the recount crisis, which many Democrats perceived as motivated by partisan rather than legal concerns.

• There were a number of overseas ballots missing postmarks or filled out in such a way that they were invalid under Florida law. A poll worker filled out the missing information on some hundred of these ballots. The Democrats moved to have all overseas ballots thrown out because of this. These disputes added to the mass of litigation between parties to influence the counting of ballots. The largest group of disputed overseas ballots were military ballots, which the Republicans argued to have accepted.

• Some 179,855 ballots were not counted in the official tally. These were ballots which were mistakenly filled out, however, in some counties the voting machines ( Accuvote s) would return the ballot and allow voters to try again, whereas in other counties the reject mechanisms were not enabled, thus giving voters only one chance to mark the ballot correctly. As a general trend, reject mechanisms were disabled disproportionately in counties with Democratic Party county leadership and African-American and Hispanic populations.

• A suit by NAACP (NAACP v. Harris) argued that Florida was in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the US Constitution's Equal Protection Amendment. Settlement agreements were reached in this suit. [1] However, a systematic investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice found no evidence of racial discrimination Letter to Congress.

• 57,746 voters were listed as felons on a " scrub list" and removed from the voting rolls, but later analysis shows that many were incorrectly listed. (For instance, many had names similar to actual felons, and some erroneously listed felonies were dated years in the future.See bullet 2 on this screenshot) These persons were disproportionately Democrats of African-American and Hispanic descent. In some cases, those on the scrub list were given several months to appeal, and many successfully reregistered and were allowed to vote. However, in many cases no effort was made to contact them before the election.

'"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon," [Volusia County Department of Elections spokeswoman Etta] Rosado said. "If he's on our rolls, we make a notation on there. If they show up at a polling place, we'll say, 'Wait a minute, you're a convicted felon, you can't vote. Nine out of 10 times when we repeat that to the person, they say 'Thank you' and walk away. They don't put up arguments." Rosado doesn't know how many people in Volusia were dropped from the list as a result of being identified as felons.' [2]

However, in balance an additional 8,000 non-felons had been supplied by the state of Texas, via Database Technologies, and these people were added to the list in May 2000. Several months after the election, the Palm Beach Post revealed this story. These 8,000 were later removed from the list following a story by the Palm Beach Post . 714 Illinoisans and 990 Ohioans were added in the same fashion and not removed. Because of the awareness of the incorrect names on the scrub list, twenty counties opted to discard the entire list of felons, resulting in many thousands of felons being permitted to vote. [3] (See also: Florida Central Voting File)

• People like Washington County Elections Chief Carol Griffen ( 1 p.25), have argued that Florida was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by requiring those convicted of felonies in other states (and subsequently restored their rights by said states), to request clemency and a restoration of their rights, from Governor Bush, in a process which might take two years and ultimately was left to Bush's discretion. One should note Schlenther v. Florida Department of State (June 1998) which ruled that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where his civil rights had not been lost, from exercising his civil rights.

• A full cousin of George W. Bush, John Prescott Ellis, was analysing data from the Voter News Service for Fox News and had several times contact by telephone with both George and Jeb Bush that night. It was his decision to call Florida for Bush, with Fox being the first network to do so. However, Fox had also incorrectly called the state for Gore before the polls had closed, like the other networks, and retracted around the same time they did which was at around 10pm that evening. Fox only called the state for Bush at 2:16am, with the other major networks announcing the same within minutes.

4.2 Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots

The result of the Florida U.S. Presidential race was so close that one Florida county's hard-to-use ballot may have decided the presidency. Critics argue that some voters in Palm Beach County might have accidentally voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, when they thought they were voting for Al Gore, on a so-called "butterfly ballot". The Democrats are listed second in the left-hand column; but punching a hole in the second circle actually cast a vote for Buchanan, first listing in the right-hand column. Voters who punched this second hole would have ignored a prominent arrow on the ballot showing which hole was to be punched, because the design of the ballot neglected the effects of parallax due to the center row of holes being in a different plane from the two columns of printed names, and the ballot being viewed at an oblique angle.[4].

The Palm Beach Post's review of the discarded ballots showed that 5,330 votes were cast for the presumably rare cross-party combination of Gore and Buchanan, compared with only 1,631 for the equivalent cross-party combination of Bush and Buchanan. In response, others point out that the ballot was designed by a Democrat, Theresa LePore (who stated that she was basically unaffiliated and registered as a Democrat only because the county had historically chosen Democrats for her position), and approved by representatives of both major parties. But neither of these responses go to the issue of whether the ballot may have inadvertently cost Gore the election.

Buchanan said on The Today Show, November 9, 2000:

When I took one look at that ballot on Election Night ... it's very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief they voted for Al Gore.

Although Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on November 9, 2000, "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes there", Buchanan's Florida coordinator, Jim McConnell , responded, "That's nonsense", and Jim Cunningham, chairman of the executive committee of Palm Beach County's Reform Party, responded, "I don't think so. Not from where I'm sitting and what I'm looking at." Cunningham estimated the number of Buchanan supporters in Palm Beach County to be between 400 and 500. Asked how many votes he would guess Buchanan legitimately received in Palm Beach County, he said, "I think 1,000 would be generous. Do I believe that these people inadvertently cast their votes for Pat Buchanan? Yes, I do. We have to believe that based on the vote totals elsewhere."

4.3 The Florida Ballot Project recounts

The Florida Ballot Project at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major U.S. news organizations, conducted a comprehensive review all uncounted ballots in the Florida 2000 presidential election, and reported how different layouts correlate with voter mistakes. Its findings were reported by the media during the week after November 12, 2001.

Recounts yielded mixed results, and a full report was published by The Miami Herald (). A less comprehensive study (with somewhat contradictory results) was performed by the NORC, as seen in a report by a Washington Post journalist. [5]

Candidate Outcomes Based on Potential Recounts in Florida Presidential Election 2000 (outcome of one particular study; not representative of all studies)
Review Method		Winner
Review of All Ballots Statewide (Never Undertaken)
•	Standard as set by each county Canvassing Board during their survey	Gore by 171
•	Fully punched chads and limited marks on optical ballots	Gore by 115
•	Any dimples or optical mark	Gore by 107
•	One corner of chad detached or optical mark	Gore by 60
Review of Limited Sets of Ballots (Initiated But Never Completed)
•	Gore request for recounts of all ballots in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Volusia counties	Bush by 225
•	Florida Supreme Court of all undervotes statewide	Bush by 430
•	Florida Supreme Court as being implemented by the counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes as well as undervotes	Bush by 493
Certified Result (Official Final Count)
•	Recounts included from Volusia and Broward only	Bush by 537

4.4 Response to the problems

4.4.1 Electronic voting

Since the Presidential Election was so close and hotly contested in Florida, the U.S. Government and state governments have pushed for election reform to be prepared by the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election. Many of Florida's year 2000 election night problems stemmed from voting machine issues like rejected ballots, 'hanging chads', and the possibly confusing 'butterfly ballot'. An opportunistic solution to these problems was assumed to be installation of modern electronic voting machines.

Electronic voting was initially touted by many as a panacea for the ills faced during the 2000 election. In years following, such machines were questioned for a lack of a redundant paper trail, less than ideal security standards, and low tolerance for software or hardware problems. The U.S. Presidential Election of 2000 spurred the debate about election and voting reform, but it did not end it. See .

• National Committee on Federal Election Reform
• The Constitution Project - Election Reform Initiative

4.4.2 Exit polling and declaration of vote winners

The Voter News Service's reputation was badly tarnished by its treatment of Florida's presidential vote in the year 2000. Calling the state as a win for Gore 12 minutes before polls closed in Florida's central time zone may have affected the vote results, and inconsistent polling results caused the VNS to change its call from Gore to Bush to 'too close to call'. An attempt by VNS to use computer tallying during the 2002 congressional election was a failure, and the VNS disbanded.

The 2004 election is expected to have exit polling done by two professional veteran polling experts, and all vote tallying for the networks is (so far) expected to be done by the Associated Press. Whether this change in procedure results in more accurate 'calls' for candidates, and avoids premature calls such as Florida's, remains to be seen in the upcoming election.

5 Minor party candidates

There were five other candidates on the majority of the 51 ballots (50 states plus the District of Columbia):

Harry Browne ( Libertarian, 50), Pat Buchanan ( Reform, 49), Ralph Nader ( Green, 44), Howard Phillips ( Constitution, 41),

and John Hagelin ( Natural Law, 38).

Nader was the most successful of third party candidates, drawing 2.74% of the popular vote. His campaign was marked by a traveling tour of "super-rallies"; large rallies held in sports arenas like Madison Square Garden, with filmmaker Michael Moore as master of ceremonies. After initially ignoring Nader, the Gore campaign made a big publicity pitch to (potential) Nader supporters in the final weeks of the campaign, downplaying Gore's differences with Nader on the issues and claiming that Gore's ideas were more similar to Nader's than Bush's were, noting that Gore had a better chance of winning than Nader. On the other side, the Republican Leadership Council ran pro-Nader ads in a few states in a likely effort to split the "left" vote.[6] In the aftermath of the campaign, many Gore supporters blamed Nader for drawing enough would-be Gore votes to push Bush over Gore, labeling Nader a "spoiler" candidate.

6 Media post-electoral studies/recounts

In November 2001, after conducting an unofficial recount of Florida’s ballots, the news outlets discovered that if all legally cast votes had been counted - regardless of the standard used for evaluating chads - Gore won [7].

In 2003, US citizens living in the state of Florida were asked who they voted for in the 2000 Election as part of the Statistical Abstract Census . The results showed President Bush receiving more than 1000 votes more than former Vice President Gore. However this result was badly tarnished when it was discovered that the man responsible for this census had links to the original Bush campaign in 2000.

7 Abstention of D.C. elector

One elector from the District of Columbia, Barbara Lett-Simmons, abstained from voting in the Electoral College, in protest of the District's lack of a voting representative in Congress. D.C. does have a non-voting delegate to Congress.

8 Close states

1. Florida, 0.01%
2. New Mexico, 0.06%
3. Wisconsin, 0.22%
4. Iowa, 0.31%
5. Oregon, 0.44%
6. New Hampshire, 1.27%
7. Minnesota, 2.40%
8. Missouri, 3.34%
9. Ohio, 3.51%
10. Nevada, 3.55%
11. Tennessee, 3.86%
12. Pennsylvania, 4.17%
13. Maine, 5.11%
14. Michigan, 5.13%
15. Arkansas, 5.44%
16. Washington, 5.58%
17. Arizona, 6.28%
18. West Virginia, 6.32%
19. Louisiana, 7.68%
20. Virginia, 8.04%
21. Colorado, 8.36%
22. Vermont, 9.94%

9 See also

• U.S. presidential election
• George W. Bush presidential campaign, 2000
• Al Gore presidential campaign, 2000
• History of the United States (1988-present)
• Other close U.S. presidential elections: 1800, 1844, 1876, 1884, 1888, 1916, 1960, 1968, 1976, 2004

10 External links and references

• Better World Links on the U.S. Presidential Election 2000
• The Betrayal of America by Vincent Bugliosi (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001) BooksEnthsiast.com
• The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast (Pluto Press, 2002) BooksEnthsiast.com
• Timeline of the 2000 Presidential Election
• Presidential Primaries, Caucuses, and Conventions
• Selected primary candidates for the election
• Report from U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
• Top Democratic Party contributors
• Top Republican Party contributors
• UK Guardian newspaper special report on US 2000 election
• Supreme Court Decisions of December 9th 2000

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